


Two Bedrooms in the Same House

by disco_vendetta (brinn)



Category: The Host - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 09:05:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/disco_vendetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I just wish I could know what’s going on in your head.” What he means is, <i>I will never be a part of you the way she was.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Bedrooms in the Same House

_You will wonder_  
 _if she looks like you, if you are two_  
 _bedrooms in the same house._  
 _Did he fall for her_  
 _features_  
 _like rearranged furniture?_  
“Unrequited Love Poem,” Sierra deMulder

 

Jeb builds a still in one of the outermost caves about two months after Wanda goes away. “A man needs a hobby,” is all he’d mumbled defensively when Maggie had found him smuggling piping under his jacket, which he quickly followed up with a traditional “My house, my rules” and then something about how the South would rise again, after which they’d all lost interest in him, if not in his newfound love of microbrewing.

Alcohol had been one of the first things to start disappearing once the souls took over, wasn’t something they even considered looking for on their supply runs until it was already gone from all the but the backest of backwater gas stations, even those now clean and welcoming and pristine. It’s not surprising, really, that the souls hadn’t seen the point of something that made a violent and impulsive race even more violent and impulsive, but it’s just _unfair_ that the survivors can’t get drunk after the apocalypse. That’s got to be against the codes of wartime conduct: all invading nations must allow the invadee to get shitfaced wasted when circumstances dictate its necessity.

He sleeps with Wanda held close to his body at night (he naturally tends to sprawl as soon as he’s out, so half the time he wakes up facedown with the cryotank pinned under his chest, leaving him covered all over with weird indentations that half the time form arcing bruises that Kyle starts referring to as hickeys whenever he takes his shirt off in the fields. ( _“Your girlfriend give you another hickey last night, bro?”_ The only one more likely at any moment to haul off and deck his brother in the face is Melanie, so at least they’ve got that in common.) During the day Wanda’s tucked snug under his arm or placed gently on the tabletop next to him while he eats, left at the very edge of the black pool next to a flashlight so he can keep an eye on her while he distractedly scrubs at his hair. He always feels a little weird taking baths in front of her (it’s not like she’s awake) (...it’s not like he’s not even sure if her soul body has _eyes_ ), and he’s tempted to ask Melanie if she does this, too, when she has Wanda. But when Melanie has Wanda he never wants to talk with her at _all_ except to ask how long until it’s his turn again, and when he has Wanda Melanie never wants to talk to _anyone_ , so it’s sort of a moot point.

So he doesn’t really pay much attention to Jeb’s latest project until Melanie goes on her first raid with Jared and the guys, leaving him to take primary custody of Wanda for however long they’re gone. Since they normally switch off about every three days or so, he’s so giddy that he gluts himself on just staring at the soft light coming from the cryotank, describing to her the color of the sunsets, how high the wheat is, the exact play-by-plays of the soccer games until his voice goes hoarse every night before he falls asleep next to her, waking up sounding like he’s been chainsmoking and so content. But a week turns into two turns into three, and he feels physically sick thinking about it, not because he thinks they’re in trouble (Jared’s too good to get caught when he’s with people he doesn’t even like, he’d be twice as careful with Melanie in tow), but because Melanie’s been apart from Wanda for _three weeks_. He hates her, maybe, just a little, for the fact that she has as much of a claim to Wanda as he does - different from his, but equal. So he knows, in a sort of disjointed way, how much it’s hurting her. And how much she’ll need Wanda back.

Three weeks. She’ll want to make up every second, doing whatever it is Melanie does when she has the cryotank, and he’ll have to give it to her. He’s gotten used to this, gotten spoiled with all the attention he’s gotten to lavish on Wanda, and now he has to give her back. Knowing Melanie has her just a few feet away and he can’t be a part of it. Three weeks.

When the raiding party finally comes stumbling back into the caves, sweat-soaked and dirt-covered, Melanie’s feverish eyes scan the crowd in the kitchen until she finds him, standing in the corner with the cryotank held gently in his hands, ready for her. She darts over to him, her eyes drinking in the sight of the silvery tank, scanning it all over for signs of damage or change. He holds it out for her, hurting all over, and she reaches over to touch it, then catches sight of her own hands, red with dust and dried grime, and pauses with her fingers almost-but-not-quite grazing the lip of the cap.  
She makes to wipe her fingers off on her shirt, but everything on her is just as filthy as she is, and she looks up at him with a kind of desperation.

“I don’t wanna get her dirty,” she whispers.

Ian stares at her for one long second before he tucks the cryotank under his arm again, then takes one of her hands as gently as if he’s touching a wound, and grabs the hem of his shirt to scrub carefully at her palm, her knuckles, down the length of each finger. Her eyes flit restlessly from him to Wanda and back, but she’s still and pliant in his grip as he moves on to her other hand.

“There,” he says finally, holding onto Mel with one hand and reaching for the cryotank with the other, wrapping her fingers around the it, only letting go when he sees her grip tighten protectively after the initial gingerness, remembering its weight, its coolness. She _sighs_ , like the heaviness of the tank is nothing compared to the weight she’s been carrying since she left him with it, and murmurs a distant _thank you_ without looking up.

Ian looks up to see Jared and Jamie watching them, Jared’s arm looped around Jamie’s rapidly growing shoulders. Jamie is beaming (he’s dedicated himself to Parent Trapping he and Mel into tolerating each other) and Jared just smiles wryly, then ruffles Jamie’s hair and drags him off towards the trucks to unload. Mel drifts off towards their room, eyes still locked on Wanda’s glow, and Ian just stands there watching them go, feeling something fragile and important inside himself start to stretch and tear with every step she takes away from him.

 

 

Melanie finds him again late that night in the glowworm cave, getting slowly wasted on Jeb’s hillbilly booze with the bottle tucked under his arms, right up against his ribs. It’s the wrong size and it’s making the moonshine get warmer faster, but it’s better than feeling his own arm against his skin for one more second than he has to.

He starts a little when she comes in, halfway to his feet before his brain can catch up to him, and the glowworms snuff themselves out as he slumps back against the cave wall. When they slowly blink back to life, Mel’s sitting next to him, the soft greenish light illuminating her in ribbons - a flash of cheekbone, the ridge of her nose, the smooth edge of the cryotank in her hands.

“What’re you drinking?” She she asks conversationally, stretching her legs out in front of her. (Wanda had always sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, always making herself as small as possible - as if Wanda could ever be unnoticeable, as if she didn’t fill up his entire vision.)

“An old Stryder family recipe,” he says, passing her the bottle. She takes a sip then rolls her eyes so hard he can actually hear it across the floor. “Nothin’ like a white trash cocktail,” he adds, laughing as she wipes her mouth on her sleeve. He takes the bottle back and takes another swig, the moonshine an eyewatering bite at the end of the too-sweet wash of the Mountain Dew he’s mixed it with. (Never once had there been an O’Shae who claimed to be classy.)

“How was the raid?” He asks after a few minutes of silence, while their eyes adjust to the light again. He nudges the bottle at her arm, only partly an excuse to sneak a glance at the cryotank again. Melanie sighs heavily and takes drink in earnest.

“Long and pointless,” she finally says wetly, coughing slightly at the burn. “Jesus Christ, how can you voluntarily do this to yourself?”

“Swish it a little before you drink,” he says, miming the motion then realizing she probably can’t see yet. “Mixes it together.” He hears the liquid slosh against the inside of the bottler then the sound of her swallowing again, a less ambitious sip this time. She _hmms_ skeptically and hands the bottle back to him.

He’s buzzed enough that he feels relaxed and loose, but not so much that he’s chatty, so they’ve been sitting for a while before he realizes that Melanie is antsy. He spends a good five minutes listening to her shift her weight around, crack her knuckles, butterfly her bent knees apart and then back together. Finally, he takes pity on her.

“Somethin’ on your mind, Melanie?” he drawls.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been a dick to you,” she blurts out. “About Wanderer. About...everything. I don’t mean to be. I mean, I _mean_ to be, obviously, but...I’m sorry.”  
“S’okay,” he mumbles, suddenly shy and fumbly-feeling. His hands are too big and too empty and he wraps them around the Mountain Dew bottle until the plastic starts to crunch.

“It’s just -” He sees Mel rub at her face out of the corner of his eye. “It’s really confusing for me. Being around you.”

She lets that hang there and it’s been long enough that he’s starting to feel uncomfortable when he realizes she has one arm stuck out and is making grabby fingers at him, impatiently waiting for him to pay attention to her. He hastily shoves the bottle at her and she sucks down a few wet sips before continuing.

“Wanderer and I fought about you for so long. I hated you at first. For trying to kill us,” He flinches like he’s been hit, but she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. “For treating my body like it was her body. For loving her as much as me.” Another slosh of liquid and a shuddering breath. “But I saw everything that she saw. And I felt everything that she felt. So I look at you now, and - and I remember loving you. I remember what it felt like. And sometimes when I’m distracted, I’ll see you and it’ll _feel_ like it did before. But it’s not.”

_Because she’s gone._ They don’t say it, but he hears it as loudly as his own breathing right now.

“What was it like?” He asks suddenly, and he doesn’t even realized he’s said it out loud at first, he’s _thought_ it so many times it’s just become a kind of mental white noise whenever Melanie’s around. _What was it like, what was_ she _like, how did it feel?_ “Having her there?”

“Crowded,” she mumbles with a dry pretend-laugh.

“Don’t quote her back at me.” There is absolutely no reason this should make him angry, but it does, because that was a conversation he had with Wanda, that was _private_ , except of course that it wasn’t because Melanie was there, too, because Melanie was _always_ there, too. He never once had her to himself.

“Shit, chill out,” she snaps back at him. The glow worms flicker uncertainly at their raised voices and he can see the blurry light reflecting off her scowl, the look so foreign on her face, even after all this time.

She does some _Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the fucking idiots I cannot change_ breathing for a few moments before continuing.

“It wasn’t crowded, really. That wasn’t the right word, even when she said it, she was just too distracted to think of the right one. I mean, at first it was...agony. It was absolute fucking agony, and I hated her for not even having the good grace to be a bitch to me to make it easier to hate her. It was still pretty easy to hate her those first few weeks, though.”

He finds this frankly fictional-sounding, that Wanda could ever be easy to hate when she was the easiest thing in the world to love, but he bites the thought down to keep from interrupting her train of thought, in case she ever gets to the good parts.

“I couldn’t... _feel_ my body, exactly. Not all the time. It was like watching a really good movie - you know, you gasp and get out of breath when scary stuff is happening, but you know it’s not really going to hurt you. And I know that was frustrating for her, because all this horrible stuff kept happening to us but she was the only one who had to feel it. But I had to watch,” she adds, softly, almost a whisper. “Later, I had to watch.”

And he knows how heavy this is for her, can actually _see_ the weight of it force her shoulders down in the dim light until she’s resting her chin on the rim of the cryotank. But she is also totally holding out on him and it’s unacceptable.

“No, but what was it _like_? I mean, she was _hugging your brain_ for a year, Melanie. How did that _feel_ , I mean, how did it physically feel to you?”

“It doesn’t _work_ like that, O’Shae,” she growls, her voice coming out mish-mashed from having her mouth pressed up against the metal lid. Melanie is officially drunker than he is now. “You don’t _feel_ your brain right now, do you? So how the hell would you know if it felt ‘ _different?_ ’”

“Nuh-uh,” he insists, and okay, maybe he is a little more sloshed than he initially calculated, too, because as a rule he doesn’t try to substitute gutteral vowel sounds for human speech. “You feel, like, headaches. That’s feeling your brain.”

“There is not a single person in the fucking _world_ who gets a headache and thinks _My brain hurts._ You just think _I have a headache._ ”

“ _Your head is your brain!_ ” The glow worms flick out again just as he’s jabbing his index finger at Melanie, and he’s so startled that he overbalances a little and tips onto his shoulder on the ground. He flops over onto his back and mutters, “I’ll just stay here for a minute,” to no one in particular while he sprawls out and feels like he’s got the bedspins.

“You’re _drunk_ ,” Melanie says condescendingly, and tries to poke at him with her toe and instead just sort of waves her foot in the hair above his face.

“ _You’re_ drunk,” he mumbles back past the hands he’s got pressed against his face, trying to keep the glow worm lights from spinning like nebulas. He would’ve paid attention, he thinks stubbornly against the red-black flowers his fingers have got blossoming across the insides of his eyelids. He wouldnt’ve have missed how it felt to have Wanda’s starlight body touching a part of him.

Melanie slumps down further against the wall until her chin is tucked up against her chest and one ankle is bumping the top of his head. She nudges the bottle at his shoulder and he fully intends to _shove that evil away from him_ because this shit is _so_ not worth the hangover he’s going to have tomorrow but somehow he’s trying to pour it sideways into his mouth and dribbling Hill People Juice all over the cave floor instead.

“Lightweight,” she sighs contentedly, crinkling the bottle in her hand again. Which is a fucking _lie_ , by the way, it’s not his fault that Jeb probably bottle-fed her this stuff. He wonders with a kind of miserable fascination if Jamie could drink him into a puddle on the floor, too.

They sit like that for a while, in companionable, plastered silence until his humming rendition of that _if I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go_ song is interrupted by Melanie’s surprisingly sober-sounding voice.

“Do you ever hate me? For not being her? It’s okay if you do,” she adds sincerely, “I’d get it, I’d understand.”

“No.” There’s no hesitation. He’s never been uncertain of this. “You’ve never been her. I always knew that.”

He rubs the fabric of his t-shirt back and forth between his thumb and index finger for a beat, feeling the soft scrape of the dirt he rubbed off her hands, before continuing.   
“Sometimes...I used to hate you, but not for that. You got to be a _part_ of her, Melanie. You got to know - I mean know for _sure_ \- every single thing she was thinking. She couldn’t lie to you to make you happy. She couldn‘t hide anything from you. Even if we get her a new host,” he sees Melanie wrap her body around the cryotank almost convulsively, “You’ll still always have had that. Sometimes I wish -” He cuts himself off before that thought can finish. It’s too much, it’s too close, it’s not for anyone but him. “I don’t hate you. I never _really_ hated you. Being jealous is just easier than being sad.”

Melanie wriggles her shoulders against the cave wall until she’s flat on the ground like him, then pivots her body around like a canoe until their their heads are even. Her long hair tickles at his ear and he shoves it away, jabbing Melanie in the neck in the process.

He thinks she’s poking him back when she grabs his wrist in a vice grip, and says suddenly, “I wanna try something.”

It not like he hasn’t thought about where he knows this is going. Despite how sure he is in himself, in his constancy when it comes to Wanda, sometimes he’ll see Melanie out of the corner of his eye, at breakfast when he’s still half-asleep, and she’ll move like Wanda for just a second - crossing her ankles under the table, tilting her head at a precise angle - and he feels the familiar tug at his gut that Wanda always gave him. It turns to a lurching sense of dislocation a second later, always. But he used to be in love with that face.

_Wanda would want this for her_ , he thinks distantly.

“Okay.”

He holds still with his eye closed in the dark, and he lets them open for just a second to keep the glimpse of Wanda’s face in his mind before her lips brush up against his, her chin bumping his nose and forehead against his jaw, Spiderman-style.

Her lips turn hard and determined, teeth dragging against his lip for just a second before she pulls back and flops back on the ground with a dramatic slap of skin.

“Well, that was pointless,” she sighs.

“I miss her so much,” he says to the ceiling. Nothing. There’s nothing left of Wanda for him to grab onto in Melanie. They’re both just fumbling for some trace of her and as always, she’s in the cryotank, close enough to hold but never, ever to touch.

When he feels her grabbing at his hand again he makes to roll away, but suddenly the gritty warmth of Melanie’s fingers is replaced by the slippery coolness of metal against his palm. Her can vaguely feel Melanie petting the smooth edge of the cryotank while he just enjoys the way it fits precisely into the dip of his palm like a coffee mug.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Wanderer,” Melanie laughs dryly.

“You always call her Wanderer,” he says. “Does she like that better? Better than Wanda, I mean?”

“No, she likes them both, they’re just...different.” The unconcerned surety in her voice just kills him. She sounds like Jamie listing off the rules of soccer, impatiently explaining something she already knows by heart. “She was just Wanderer to me first. She liked that I still called her that because it made her feel like she was still a soul. But Wanda was a gift, from Jeb, to help her belong here. They both made her feel loved. Although I don’t think she ever really thought about it much - names are so transient for her.”

“ _Transient_ ,” he says grandly, and Mel fake-snarls and hits him hard in the shoulder and he laughs like it doesn’t hurt but it _totally_ hurts.

The next morning they’re both hungover so bad they can’t do much more the first hour they’re awake than sit at a kitchen table and hold their hands over their eyes and _moan_.

“Mornin’, children.”

“ _You_ ,” Ian hisses, pointing accusingly at Jeb’s smug-asshole face. “ _You did this to me._ ”

“Weeding duty waits for no man, O’Shae,” he crows so loudly that Ian winces like he just broke a two-by-four over his ear.

“You’re a goddamn monster,” Melanie groans, mutiny in her eyes.

“You’re burnin’ daylight!” his retreating voice echoes back to them as he marches off to systematically destroy someone else’s liver.

Ian glances at Mel over where Wanda’s cryotank is resting equidistantly between them, and they roll their bloodshot eyes in perfect unison.

 

 

The host they bring back for Wanda has red hair that falls in cork-screwy curls, a thick dusting of freckles across each cheekbone and down the bridge of her nose. She’s short and hour-glassy and has scars on each knee that her soul opted to keep. He tries not to notice these things.

He holds the cryotank tightly under one arm when they bring the unconscious soul into the infirmary, Jared and Doc lifting her onto the cot like she’s made of glass. He hates himself right now because he can’t help the vague sense of resentment that swelling up inside of him like an infection: _that isn’t her._

Not that he’s Jamie and he has an exact vision of what Wanda “looks like” as a human, but they’re treating the body like it’s Wanda already and it _isn’t_ , he’s got Wanda right here, safe.

He’s always had a thing for redheads, his first kiss in the fifth grade had hair like a new penny, and he knows Jamie knows that because Kyle is an asshole with a big mouth. It’s like they’re trying to tailor the body to _him_ when Wanda is the only thing that matters at all, ever.

“Ian, come help me,” Doc orders calmly, horse-whispering them all into doing what he needs. “We’re going to take the soul out.”

“ _Now?_ ” he asks incredulously. “Shouldn’t you, like, prep or something?”

“The souls’ medicine makes most of that unnecessary, honestly. And anyway, I don’t want to lose my nerve. Melanie, do you have the tank ready?”

Ian jerks, clutching Wanda tight to his chest without meaning to, but Mel bustles past him, with one of their dozen spares, the metal glinting brightly under the overhead lights.

“Jeb, hold this,” he says suddenly, pushing Wanda’s tank into his big, worn hands. “Jamie’s too excited about this,” he says lowly at Jeb’s questioning look. Jamie wants his best friend back. It’s easy to forget to be careful when everything you want is right in front of you. He fell asleep when Wanda went to the infirmary the last time.

“Ian, you stand on the other side of the table,” says Doc. “No, not there, you’re in my light, see? Good. I’ll do the incision and it’ll be your job to remove the soul from the host, alright. Mel, you need to have that tank ready for our guest.”

“Me?” He half-yelps, resisting the urge to shove the host away from him, grab Wanda, and run.

“Souls need to feel love, Ian,” Doc says simply. “Do you remember how Wanda showed us?” Of course he does, he remembers everything, everything she ever said, he remembers the way her face had gone soft and a little heartbroken at his wonderstruck face at the soul in his cupped hands. He nods, and tries to keep that look on Wanda’s face in his mind’s eye as Doc makes the incision (just below where the carroty hair starts) and carefully spreads the skin to expose the glowing body clinging to the spine just underneath. _Souls need to feel love_ , he repeats to himself, unbidden.

They all lean in without thinking and Doc reminds them to _stay out of his damn light, please_ and they draw back with a jerk before leaning in again, more carefully.

It looks like Wanda, but - and this is the revelation - it also doesn’t. Because he was watching, very, very closely when they put Wanda into the cryotank, and this soul’s limbs are sort of...he doesn’t want to say _stumpy_ because it sounds rude, and he doesn’t want the soul to sense anything but fondness and draw away from him, but if a tiny ball of light and feelers can be stocky, this one is. It moves slightly jerkily, but with more determination than Wanda had. Wanda had sort of floated, where this one inches towards him with purpose, determinedly seeking out his hands, the main body trying to stretch into his palm even as its feelers are still detaching from their anchors.

“Easy now,” he breathes, stroking it gently with one thick finger, “Don’t rush it.” He keeps his thumb tracing gentle circles on the nodule on the soul’s side while he tries to think _you’re beautiful_ as loudly as he can at the soul, and tries desperately to keep from adding _but not as beautiful as her_ or _this is sort of weirdly dirty_.

“It’s still a baby,” Mel muses from his other side, “See the little feelers at the end of the filaments? Those go away after about the first life or so.”

The host wakes up three hours later, says her name is Katherine, and starts crying. He gives Wanda to Melanie for the night and pretends not to see the angry tears blurring her eyes as she presses her cheek against the metal.

The truth is that he doesn’t want Wanda to have to see his relief that he doesn’t have to give her up yet.

 

 

This is the secret he can't tell even Wanda: sometimes when he's alone, he lets himself imagine being her host, his body the armor that keeps her safe from everything outside. He'd _know_ her, he'd feel her every thought, she could see the love spread out across his mind for her like a feast.

He knows what Wanda would say, what any of them would say - that it's the fighting that's kept other hosts awake, that loving her, wanting her there more than anything would just make him fade away faster. That there's no guarantee he wouldn't just disappear entirely.

He doesn't think he would.

 

 

It’s Melanie’s crack-addition to artificial cheese products that actually saves them from all going feral now that they have to use cactus soap again. She goes to the store room cave near the exit before lunch one day, and comes back empty-handed and crazy-eyed. She snaps at four separate people before Jared tells her to stop acting like a brat just because she can’t have Cheetos.

“Why don’t you just go into the stores like before? They never asked questions before!”

A vein starts pulsing in Jared’s forehead like he’s giving real consideration to having a stroke just out of spite.

“Look, a group of souls no one’s ever met before, all wearing sunglasses and dirty clothes isn’t going to cut it anymore. We don’t have Wanda and her eyes to give us credibility.”

“Maybe we do,” Mel says so quietly they almost don’t hear, her (blue) eyes vacant like she’s thinking hard and fast. Jamie hushes everyone into silence, and they all turn to her, looking varying levels of skeptical.

“No, listen. It’s true the souls are more careful now, but they’re still trusting by nature. It would never in a million years occur to one of them who wasn’t a Seeker that a body they _know_ to be a host suddenly wouldn’t be anymore. So,” she goes on haltingly, chewing at her thumb nail as she thinks, “ _So_ , if we go somewhere we’ve _already been_ , somewhere they’d already seen Wanderer, they would just assume that I _was_ still Wanderer. We wouldn’t need to show our eyes to prove we’re souls. If they recognize me, they’ll just assume whoever is with me is a soul, too.”

“We don’t need Wanda’s eyes if we’ve still got her face,” Jared says distractedly, nodding.

“Ian needs to come with me,” Mel says suddenly, looking up.

“You’re not going without me.” Jared’s voice is flat.

“Name three aliases Wanderer used on her runs,” Mel counters, crossing her arms over her chest.

Jared glares resentful, pointy little daggers at her. “Rides the Bear.”

“Rides the _Beast_ , and that’s not an alias, that was actually her name. She’s supposed to be missing.”

“Hundred Lea - Petals. Hundred Petals.”

“Thousand Petals,” Ian says unhappily. This isn’t going anywhere he likes.

“I need someone who can think of a history on the fly with me. If our stories don’t match up, it’s going to look suspicious. then they _will_ start to wonder why we won’t take our sunglasses off.”

“You’re not going without me,” Jared repeats, stubborn as desert rock. Melanie cracks her knuckles and settles in for a long argument. Ian starts his mental checklist of things for Jamie to remember when he’s taking care of the cryotank.

 

 

“Thousand Petals?”

Melanie jerks up from where she’s examining a bulk box of Cheetos, arranging her face into a beaming smile. “Yes! It is so pleasant to see you again.” The clerk looks at Ian expectantly. Mel, her rhythm momentarily broken, forces even more sunniness into her face.

“And this is my partner, um...Glitter...Weaver.” She laces her fingers through his and tries to look affectionate.

“It sounds better in Bear,” Ian says, smiling past grit teeth. He’s about to ask where the shampoo is, or maybe bolt out the door, when the clerk turns to Jared.

“Are you Thousand Petals’s partner as well?”

Jared smiles, huge and panicked, and says - absolutely nothing. As the seconds of silence start to turn awkward, Ian blurts out, “Yes! This is Scott.”

“He was a See Weed until quite recently,” Mel adds with a indulgent smile.

“Ah!” The clerk’s face brightens with understanding. “I found the change to a vocalization-based language quite challenging as well,” he adds, patting Jared’s arm encouragingly. “It will get easier soon.”

Jared just smiles and nods and wraps his arm around Ian’s shoulder hard enough to bruise.

“Could you tell us where the shampoo is?” Ian asks desperately, trying to keep his expression free of panic and full of encompassing love and compassion for all beings.

“Of course! Vermillion, would you come here, please?” A teenage host in a sleek clerk’s vest (Jesus Christ, there is literally nothing on earth they managed to leave ugly and embarrassing) trots over and looks at them expectantly.

“Vermilion, this is Thousand Petals, and her partners, Glitter Weaver and Scott.” They all smile so hard he can see a muscle start to jump in Mel’s cheek. “Would you please show them where the toiletries are located?” Vermillion smiles like this is the best fucking idea he has ever heard in his life, like he is so excited to show them the shampoo isle he could just die of happiness, and they all shuffle over, still clutching at each other with vice grips.

 

 

“Who knew the souls were polyamorous,” Jared laughs, slamming the back of the truck closed.

“Shouldn’t _you_ have?” Ian says sulkily, glaring at Mel sideways.

“Wanda hadn’t thought of it that way,” she shrugs, swinging up into the middle seat and purposefully leaving very little room for him to squeeze into because Melanie is a petty brat.

“Is she just not into threesomes?” Jared says, looking genuinely curious under his shit-eating grin as Ian hip-checks Mel to get at the seat belt buckle.

“Part of that was me, and my body’s memories of...normalcy, I guess. But most of it was her.” She checks the rearview anxiously as they pull out of the parking lot and turn onto the highway, deja vu all over again. Her voice is distracted but soft when she continues. “Wanderer was...really lonely for most of her lives, although I don’t think she really realized that until she came to the caves. It just didn’t occur to her that there could ever be more than one other soul she’d ever want to be with that long. Or one who would want to be with her,” she adds after a moment. “Just for her, I mean. Any soul would have stayed with her if she’d asked them and said it was important to her.”

“Casual dating must be weird for souls,” Ian mumbles, deeply interested but also not wanting to have this conversation in front of Jared. Or even Melanie. He wants to ask Wanda these things.

“A partner isn’t just a _mate_ , or not always. It can also mean, like...like a best friend. Someone you’d want to move from world to world with.”

“Soulmates,” Jared grins, deeply pleased with himself.

Mel glares at him, but add begrudgingly, “That’s not a terrible translation, actually. The others worlds have different names for different kinds of partners, but our language is more...limited. The Bears had, like, eighty different words for levels of _togetherness_.”

When finally get back to the caves, they all collapse in the glow worm cave, Jamie and Jared watching with bemused smiles as he and and Mel fall asleep back to back with the cryotank pressed between the wings of their shoulder blades.

 

 

When Wanda opens her new eyes for the first time, he presses his lips to the empty cryotank and whispers _thank you_ , and then leaves it behind him like a shed skin.

 

 

He picks up his room, rearranges his uneven dresser so that one drawer is empty, cleans off half of the table. (In case Wanda wants to leave any of her clothes there. Or all of her clothes. Then his brain goes off on a tangent about her clothes all over his floor and he gets distracted for a while.)

He was always a little messy at home, his mom forever asking him if he could _please_ not just drop his jacket wherever he felt like on the floor, clean his room, put away his half-drunk coffee cups, pick up the shoes he left scattered from room to room. But here he dusts off his shelves every other night, folds his clothes, makes his bed, and in dim light it barely even looks like a cave at all. His mom would like that, he thinks, she’d want that for him.

So he keeps his room clean because his mom would want him to, even after the alien apocalypse, and he still kicks off his boots and leaves them in the middle of the floor. When he stumbles over them in the morning or getting up to piss in the middle of the night, he can still hear her voice clear as anything in his ears. ( _”I’m not going to say I told you so, honey, but I’m gonna_ think _it_ real _loud.”_ )

He thinks he should change his sheets and starts stripping them off the thin mattress, then thinks that that’s presumptuous and gross and puts them back on, then thinks that he’s a grown-ass man who should change his sheets on a regular basis anyway and yanks them back off again.

Still, to avoid looking like a sex-crazed frat boy, he grabs whole armloads of stuff to wash with his bed things so if anyone asks he can say he’s just doing his laundry because that is a thing adult humans do. Which is why Wanda finds him at the spring with a pair of soapy boxers in his hand, which is why he wants to drown himself.

“Hello,” she says shyly, smiling and tucking her short, curly hair behind one ear. He suddenly wants to touch her hair more than he’s ever wanted anything in his entire life, so he shoves his laundry into the pool to soak, arms underwater up to the elbows until they can get ahold of themselves.

“Hey.” He’s been quiet for so long that his voice comes out weird and raspy, and he clears his throat to repeat it, but forgets what he was going to say and just winds up staring at her with his jaw slack. If Melanie’s face is all eyes, Wanda’s is all cheekbones, the pale freckles he knows are there invisible in the dim light of the cave. Her lips are small and pulpy and her hair just barely brushes her neck. She’s wearing some ridiculous, raggedy dress Mel must have found for her and she’s already got dirt under her nails and she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, will ever see.

With anyone else his extended silence would have put them in socially awkward territory by now, but Wanda just smiles at him like she’s got all the time in the world.

She steps towards him first and he pushes himself to his feet like it’s a dance and then just as quickly sits down on a large outcrop of stone jutting out by the edge of the pool. He doesn’t trust himself to stand like a normal human right now, but now his eyes are even with her breasts, which was a serious tactical error on his part because he _really_ doesn’t trust himself to stand like a normal _anything_ now.

She crosses the room to him and he notices for the first time that she’s barefoot.

“I’m still getting used to this body,” she says at his questioning stare. “I just want to feel it all. I want to feel everything again.” Her feet are suddenly even with his and her fingers twine in between his, the water mixing with the left over dirt on his hands hands and leaving little muddy smears all over hers.

“I’m all dirty,” he says guiltily. This isn’t something he’s ever given much thought to before, but now he suddenly can’t stand the thought of getting his mess all over her.

“I don’t mind.” And she pulls there joined hands up to brush his knuckles gently across her cheek. It leaves a faint, rust-red smear behind, a brushstroke on a canvas.

“Wanda, there’s something I gotta tell you,” he breathes, pulling back from her, but keeping his fingers tight through hers. He loosens his grip, as he gears up, gives her slack to pull away from him if she needs, if she wants. The words feel oily coming out of his mouth, he sounds like every asshole who ever made his girl friends cry in high school, sounds like how he always imagined his dad would sound. He knows what he did and what he felt, but it still feels like he’s mouthing the script of _MTV True Life: Dick Boyfriends._

“While you were asleep,” he starts, “Melanie and me, we were...we were trying to figure some stuff out, I guess. About you. About how we both feel about you. Her body got all confused with your body, I think, for both of us, a little bit. She kissed me,” he spits out, then thinks, _Don’t be a pussy_ , and says again, slower, “We kissed. In the glow worm cave. I was hoping it would...help her, I guess. I thought you would want me to help her. I’m sorry. It wasn’t like when I kiss you. It was just Mel. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she says lightly, smiling, curling their fingers tighter together.

“I - I’m sorry, you _know?_ ”

“Mel told me.”

“Of fucking course she did,” he grumbles. Stryders and their giant mouths.

“You know how it is with us,” Wanda chides, very gently, and he does, is the thing. He gets that over-sharing voluntarily is their way of coping with not being able to do it as a matter of course. That doesn’t make it any less _itchy_ to think that Melanie is probably going to know everything about his life down to the precise second they have finally have sex.

(If _you have sex, you gross perv_ , he thinks at himself as loud as he can. He pushes his knees tighter together so she has to stay so far away from him.)

“Thank you,” she smiles, swinging his hands in hers a little, “For doing that for her. And for telling me,” she adds, an afterthought. She’s always going to be an afterthought to Mel in her own mind. Her eyes flick down to his mouth (a flare of color like flecks of glitter catching the light), which instantly goes dry, and she nudges her legs against his knees, but he doesn’t budge.

“Listen,” he starts, then finds that he has no idea what to say, how to ask what he needs to ask, so the word just hangs there, limp as his hands.

She pulls back from him suddenly, letting his fingers drop from hers, her entire body language shifting and closing up, something of Mel working its way into the tight angle of her shoulders.

“Is it...this host? Because I -”

“No!” He snatches her hands back and pulls her in close so she’s standing between his legs. “ _No,_ Wanda, you _know_ it’s not that, you _know_ I’m always gonna want you, it’s just -”

She stares at him unblinkingly in the dim light, so still he can’t even see the silver blinking at him.

“I just don’t want you to do anything if it’s just because you want me to be happy. I want _you_ to want to be happy.”

She sighs, sounding exasperated and relieved (he can’t tell the ratio of those two feelings to each other, probably for the best, but it still smarts), leans into him so his nose is brushing her collar bone, one hand dragging through his hair from the very top of his forehead to the very back of his neck, where one finger traces a thin line of soft fire along the bumps of his spine.

“You trust me with everything else, Ian. Why can’t you trust me with this?”

“Because you’re too important to trust to just anyone.”

“Ian,” she says, taking his chin in her small fingers and dragging it up so he has to stare into her silvery eyes, a sternness he’s only ever heard her use maybe twice before creeping into her voice. “I have hundreds of your years worth of experience making my own decisions. Please don’t act like they don’t count as much as my affections.”

And that’s what convinces him, more than anything else possibly could, that she’s yelling at him a little, to the extent that she ever yells at anyone. She’d never risk upsetting him if the whole point was to indulge him. He slides his arms around her waist, bumps his forehead against her shoulder in apology.

“I’m sorry,” he says clearly. Then, softer, “I just wish I could know what’s going on in your head.” What he means is, _I will never be a part of you the way she was_.

“If you were also a soul,” Wanda whispers after a long moment, carding her fingers through his hair, “I would take you to the See Weeds, and we would grow next to each other at the bottom of the ocean and you would hear my every thought. I would spend an entire life telling you how much I love you. And then you could be sure, and we could live another life somewhere else. But you’re not, and humans have the second shortest lifespan of any body I could possibly take. Please stop wasting our time, Ian.”

Something heavy inside him that’s been sad for as long as he can remember evaporates into air as his hands slide around her hips, leaving dark damp patches on the fabric, and he kisses her like he’s thought about every day since the last time. Her lips are different than before, smaller, fuller, but they kiss exactly the same, soft and yielding under his, her (new, smaller) hands holding either side of his face the same way, so intent on him, a singleminded focus that seems at odds with the pliancy of her mouth.

He keeps one hand anchored on her hip and lets the other slide up her back, down her arm, palming her shoulder, her breast, her elbow, then back up to bury itself in her hair. She makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, then giggles into his mouth. He can’t keep the stupid smile off his face, can’t keep his lips in the right shape for kissing, so he lets his teeth drag down her jaw to her neck and then her shoulder. The loose strap of her dress slips off and he’s suddenly serious again as he presses open-mouthed kisses all along the skin there. He drags on her hip, because she was his anchor for nine months, he can her guide now, and keeps her steady when she stumbles climbing onto his lap, her dress rucking up around her thighs.

One of Wanda’s hands moves from where she was balancing herself against his shoulder to press gently against the center of his chest. He pulls back to look at her, and then he can’t _stop_ looking at her, can’t stop imprinting her face into his memory over and over and over again. She holds his face in her hands, fingers cupping his jaw, and rubs her thumbs along the sharp ridge of his cheekbones, the flat line of his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose.

“I wish we could do this for all of my lives,” she whispers, “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you, Ian.” Their foreheads are pressed against each other now, and Wanda’s hands are resting lightly against his stomach. It’s not like she’s unsure, more like she’s waiting for him to tell her what’s next, for him to draw out the map she wants to follow.

“Wanda,” breathes into her mouth, not to tell her anything, just because he loves the sound of it, the way it feels on his tongue.

His hands are sliding up her thighs and she’s breathing roughly into his mouth when they hear the sound of Luciana and the kids echoing around the hallways up ahead. They freeze, staring at each other and then suddenly Wanda bursts out laughing, giggling so loudly that he claps a mammoth hand over her mouth, which only makes her laugh more, which makes him laugh and then they’re in shambles. He pushes himself up and her legs wrap around his waist automatically and he settles his arms underneath her, running for the door and leaving his laundry in a wet pile behind them.

They’re still stupid-happy and cracking up like they’re teenagers who almost got caught in the back of dad’s pick-up by the time they get to his room. There are no sheets on his bed, so he pushes Wanda up against the wall and kisses her like he _really_ wants to get slapped, Wanda doing all the work because his belt is suddenly _way_ too complicated for him. If kissing her is the only real skillset he gets in this life, he’s content with it. When she comes her legs go loose around his waist, and then he comes and his knees start to give out, so soon they’re just in a tangle on the floor.

They stay like that for a while, Ian just watching Wanda’s face as she catalogues each sensation, her breath hitching every now and then as her body finishes unraveling. But soon he gets a crick in his neck and Wanda starts squirming around uncomfortably, so he digs out his spare set of sheets and they each take a side, Ian tucking in the corners and Wanda smoothing out the edges. It feels grown-up and nicer than he thought anything could, making their bed together, taking off their clothes, Ian changing into an old set of sweatpants and giving her a t-shirt of his to wear. It feels settled and intimate, like they’ve done it a thousand times, will do it a thousand times more. Loving Wanda is something he’s always been great at.

They draw back the covers and settle in - it’s a twin camping mattress, so they have to press themselves snug against each other, which he’s totally fine with. He’s the big spoon, because Wanda is physically incapable of being the big _anything_ , and he starts dozing off with his face pressed against her hair.

“I love you,” he mumbles before he forgets, because he wants it to be the last thing she hears before she falls asleep. He brushes his thumb along the back of her neck and presses a soft kiss to her scar. _Souls need to feel love_ , he remembers from a thousand years ago, from the endless succession of days before he had her back in his arms, and he thinks _I love you_ as hard as he can at the sliver of silver he knows he sleeping just underneath her skin.

To his utter and complete wonder, he sees a soft flare of light coming from her neck, and her skin flushes silver. He thinks of her body - her _real_ body - arching up against him like a cat, and he turns to see her expression which is - completely blank. It’s not like she’s uncomfortable, it’s like she’s not even _there._

Her arms flops onto the bed like she’s unconscious, but her eyes are open and staring vacantly.

“Jesus,” he breathes, patting at her cheek harder and harder, checking her (steady) pulse over and over again, “Wanda, baby, wake up. What’s wrong, honey, just wake up, it’s okay, _Wanda_ \- “

She blinks suddenly, and then flutters her eyelashes several times in a row, before going, “Oh.”

“Wanda?” He frantic now, touching her all over, trying to reassure himself of her. “Wanda, what happened? Did I hurt you, did I do something?”

She swallows thickly and flexes her fingers a few times, moving each limb experimentally. “Um. No. You didn’t hurt me. You, um. The opposite of hurt me.” He blinks at her a few times, lets that sink in.

“...Oh.”

“I...didn’t know I could do that,” she says, pushing herself up onto her elbows and then into a sitting position. He leans back so he’s kneeling at the foot of the bed. “My body, my... _soul_ body, it...” she trails off, looking for the words. “I’ve been physically touched only a few times in my life, Ian. I didn’t know I could feel anything like that without a host body. I didn’t know I could feel _anything_ without a host body.”

He torn between still wanting to throw up from terror and feeling deeply, deeply smug, so he just sort of scrapes his hands over his face and stares at her some more. Her eyes are the brightest thing in the room.

She plays with her hair, looks down, blushes. “I’m sorry if I worried you. I think my soul body momentarily...loosened its grip. On this host. I didn’t know I could do that,” she repeats. She stares at him nervously for a long second before he’s across the bed again and it’s a long time before they fall asleep, pressed tight together, clothes all over his floor.

 

 

He looks up from watering the fields one day to see Mel and Wanda wandering through the wheat together, swinging their clasped hands between them absently. Wanda says something and Melanie yelps out a shrieking laugh and grabs her from behind, planting a smacking kiss on the corner of her jaw, then spins away again, Mel’s cackle mixing in with Wanda’s softer giggles like birdsong.

That’s a Wanda and Mel thing, sure, but that’s just a girl thing, too. He remembers from his two years of college, all those blurry, beer-soaked parties in frat basements and the back of the art lab, how girls would dance with each other, pressed close and holding hands, for no reason. A lot of them had liked the attention, sure, a bunch of slobbery dudes transfixed by the brush of their hips. But they hadn’t needed it. They just liked the contact, pressing sloppy-sweet kisses onto each other’s cheeks, brushing hair out of each other’s faces, shouting _I love you, you’re my best friend, I love you, you know that, right?_ over the blasting music. He can still see it if he closes his eyes.

He and Kyle used to be like that when they were kids, easy and unselfconscious with affection, his mom’s solution to all scuffles between them ending with _”Now hug like brothers.”_ That had stopped when Kyle hit high school, telling him to “cut that gay shit out” whenever Ian went to grab at him. Jodi made Kyle better, softer, but it wasn’t until after she was gone that Kyle had actually started touching Ian at all besides to rough him up a bit. He’s still like that now, even though Ian’s still not used to it being back, Kyle hugging him tight whenever one of them gets back from a raid, pressing brief kisses on the top of his head when he passes Ian in a chair and then violently messing up his hair. Kyle’s still out of practice and gives affection like anything else he does, too hard and clumsy, but with all of his focus.

When he finally sees Wanda again at dinner, his sweaty skin still showing damp patches through his shirt from the fields, he grabs her by the hands as she’s walking towards him and spins her around three times so she’s dizzy and stumbley. Then he hugs her tight against his chest and presses a grimy kiss against her neck, her skin shivering and shying away from the scrape of stubble. She giggles and shoves her nasty, disgusting boyfriend away from her, but there’s no force behind it and she’s beaming at him, her eyes flashing in the orange light.

“Gross!” Jamie shouts delightedly from the line for onion soup. Jared tries to sweaty-neck-kiss Mel in retaliation and gets an elbow in the gut.

Mel and Jamie each grab an extra bowl of soup and both try to give theirs to Wanda, but Jamie’s got ninja reflexes and Mel has to shove hers at Ian resentfully. He does a lot of exaggerated _mmm!_ s and grin-and-thumbs-up combos with each spoonful until Mel nails his shin under the table with her pointy bitch-foot. Removing his injured shin from the field of combat, he swings his leg up and over so he’s straddling the bench and also Wanda, one leg brushing the small of her back and the other tangling up with her feet.

Wanda’s still gently chastising Melanie for the perpetuation of violence in humanity, but she absently reaches her arm out to wrap around his waist, and to make it easier he hunches over to tuck his chin onto her shoulder and bump his nose against her scar, same as always.

Her is arm barely long enough to reach, so he feels his shirt scratch and wrinkle as she fists her fingers in the fabric. It’s so absentminded, the way she just leans into him like she’s in a strong breeze, holds onto him like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like she doesn’t even notice that’s it’s _work_ to hang on like that, all without even looking up from staring earnestly at Mel, and God, he just loves her. Loves the way she loves him, loves that his body fits around her like old denim, loves -

Wanda’s spoon drops into her soup bowl, spills half of what’s left onto the table, and then clatters to the ground.

“Wanda?” Mel, Jamie, and Jared all ask at once, and then Mel’s voice with a flat calmness that means she’s so scared she can’t breathe, “Wanderer?”

“Aw, Christ.” Ian drags his hand over his face because he is the biggest fucking _idiot_ God ever saw fit to give life.

“Something’s wrong,” Jared says tersely, all business, coming around to the other side of the table, “She’s not moving.”

Of course she’s not. Her hand’s fallen down to her side and that spot on his skin is cold where her grip went slack.

“No, Jared, it’s fine,” he tries to get while also trying to keep Jamie from crawling under the table to come check on his BFF, “Mel, _Melanie_ , she’s okay, this is normal, it’s fine.”

“She’s not _fine_ , Ian, she’s not _moving_ ,” she half-screams.

Mel is clearly crawling out of her skin with wanting to run over to Wanda, but she grabbed her right hand over the tabletop and looks like she’s unwilling to let go even to get closer, like her hand’s the only thing keeping Wanda here. He thinks, suddenly, what it must have been like for her, watching Doc’s table get closer and closer and unable to do a thing to stop Wanda from leaving her, the black forever of _alone_ rushing up to meet her.

He grabs one of her hands away from Wanda’s (but only one, he’s _embarrassed_ , but he’s not cruel), and says softly but very clearly, “Melanie. She’s fine. This’s happened before. It’s normal. It’s okay.” Mel drags her eyes away from Wanda for the first time and stares at him, desperate. Jared is taking Wanda’s pulse in the corner of his vision.

So now he’s got her attention. Great. Awesome. _Fucking amazing, O’Shae, you moron._

“Um. Okay. Listen. This is sorta embarrassing.” Instantaneously, Mel’s grip loosens on his hand and her eyes take on a distinct _Target Acquired_ gleam. There’s a long moment where Mel just _stares at him_ and he can feel himself getting redder and redder and sweaty and it’s not like he’s ashamed of his sex life or anything, there’s nothing embarrassing about pleasing his woman, but no way did he ever ever under any circumstances any way in hell want to _discuss_ it with _anyone_ , let alone these clowns.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Mel whispers. Then, while Jared looks back and forth between her and Jamie’s virgin ears in horror, leans in and hisses, “ _Did you two figure out soul orgasms, you stupid fucker?_ ”

Jared, who is apparently a full-on soccer mom now, literally tackles Jamie where he’s managed to climb up onto the bench next to Wanda from under the table and claps his hands over the kid’s ears. Howe is visibly torn between wanting to preserve Jamie’s innocence and laughing until he barfs or bursts a blood vessel, but right now his Victorian sense of virtue has been deeply offended and he’s glaring like Ian just left porn in one of Jamie’s scifi paperbacks.

Wanda’s hand twitches and they all screech to a halt. She blinks - once, twice - and looks down at her empty hand, confused, then _sighs_ and looks at Ian despairingly.

“ _Ian._ ”

“It’s not like I can control how much I love you at a given moment!” He crosses his arms over his chest defensively, feeling deeply wronged.

“You can control how near to my scar your face is at any given moment,” Wanda grumbles, and it’s so disconcerting (Wanda _grumbling_ ) ( _Wanda_ , grumbling) that it startles a snorting laugh out of him. Wanda tries _very_ hard to stay grouchy at him, but her face collapses into a bashful smile two seconds later and then Jared is going, too, while Mel glares bloody red death at all of them and Jamie keeps shouting, “What? _What?!_ ”

“You’re welcome, by the way,” he tosses out, just to make Mel furious (she throws a roll at his head), and Wanda squeezes his knee under the table. (This is theirs, Wanda and Ian's and no one else's. This is the part of her only he gets to know. Sometimes, like right now, if he closes his eyes he can swear that Wanda's love in a real thing he can feel in his body, nestled inside him like a second heart.) The silvery blush is just fading from her skin as he pulls her in, one hand still held tight in Mel’s, and the setting sun turns their whole world gold.

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, this blame for this lies with [dudski](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dudski), who drove me to this. She also invented Parent Trap as a verb and Wanda's skin flushing silver, because she's a monster.


End file.
